(iPoster) Political Obligation and Positive Freedom in T.H. Green’s Political Theory

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 1 (Normative)

Abstract

As a political thinker, T.H. Green is best known for his doctrine of positive freedom (PF), which he contrasts with negative freedom. However, the relationship between PF and Political Obligation (PO), the central concept in his academic political theory, gives rise to a puzzle. Yet, in the majority of existing studies of his political theory the problematic nature of this relationship is insufficiently recognized and certainly not satisfactorily explained (Cf. Brink, 2003; Carritt, 1935; Dimova-Cookson, 2019; Gaus, 2000; Harris & Morrow, 1986; Milne, 1968; Nicholson, 1990; Simhony & Weinstein, 2001; and Tyler, 2010, 2012). Moreover, the doctrine of PF gives rise to an endless regression of interpretations, all of which eventually aim to provide a solution to the problem of two competing meanings of the term freedom. In this paper I will problematize the relationship between PO and PF in order to better explain the tension between these two concepts. I will then show that this conflict can be plausibly resolved against the background of Green's idealist metaphyics.
The idea of PO forms the core of his posthumously published, academic Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (LPPO) and is derived directly from his Idealist ethics as laid down in his Prolegomena to Ethics. This ethics builds on a radical critique of Kant's dualism. Green aims to solve this problem by positing an omniscient Eternal Consciousness that he elaborates on the basis of a set of central ideas, including reason, self-realization, the common good and the moral ideal. In the light of a clear upward trend in the development of the Moral Ideal, it can be determined which moral duties rest on the shoulders of individual agents. LPPO then means to specify the necessary conditions to make ethical behavior of individual agents possible in the first place. The danger of too many legal obligations is that it would limit ethical motives. PO therefore becomes a kind of balancing act between securing those minimum conditions under which ethics would become possible, on the one hand, and an excess of rules that would narrow the playing field for ethical motives, on the other. As Green puts the criterion quite pragmatically:

Those acts only should be matter of legal injunction or prohibition of which the performance or omission, irrespectively of the motive from which it proceeds, is so necessary to the existence of a society in which the moral end stated can be realised, that it is better for them to be done or omitted from that unworthy motive which consists in fear or hope of legal consequences than not to be done at all. (LPPO, Lecture A, §15).

The idea of PF, on the other hand, is formulated as part of a party political speech on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract (LLFC). In this argument, Green aims to justify a new type of social legislation in which the government steps up to combat abuses. Green famously distinguishes here between positive and negative freedom as part of an attempt to justify certain forms of state interference.

The majority of existing commentaries on Green simply treat PO and PF side by side. But it is not at all clear how these two perspectives can be linked. Moreeover, it is not at all clear how PF can be incorporated into his academic political theory. In addition, the doctrine of PF appears to have triggered some authors to theorize further about different types of freedom in Green. This very topic has led to a seemingly endless regression of interpretations. In this way, the first editor of LPPO proposes two types of freedom, namely freedom of the will vs freedom as in moral progress. Other commentators draw a distinction between legal, formal and real freedom (e.g. Nicholson, 1990; Brink, 2003). More recently, another commentator (Dimova-Cookson, 2019) suggested a fourfold division organised in a 2x2 diagram, in which the positive vs negative distinction is crossed with the moral vs political distinction.

With this overview I want to suggest that -instead of looking for a solution to the conflict between PF and negative freedom- we would do well to look at Green’s perfectionist perspective, which emerges from his ideas on moral progress and self-assertion of reason.

Author

• Ben Wempe, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University